Sunny

Sunny

“Sunny” is a soul jazz standard written by the American singer and songwriter Bobby Hebb in 1963. It is one of the most performed and recorded popular songs, with hundreds of versions released (BMI lists “Sunny” No. 25 in its “Top 100 songs of the century”.) and its chord progression influencing later songs.

Bobby Hebb’s parents, William and Ovalla Hebb, were both blind musicians. Hebb and his older brother Harold performed as a song-and-dance duo in Nashville, beginning when Bobby was three and Harold was nine. Hebb performed on a TV show hosted by country music record producer Owen Bradley.

Hebb wrote the song after his older brother, Harold, was stabbed to death outside a Nashville nightclub. Hebb was devastated by the event and many critics say it inspired the lyrics and tune. According to Hebb, he merely wrote the song as an expression of a preference for a “sunny” disposition over a “lousy” disposition following the murder of his brother.

Events influenced Hebb’s songwriting, but his melody, crossing over into R&B (#3 on U.S. R&B chart) and Pop (#2 on U.S. Pop chart), together with the optimistic lyrics, came from the artist’s desire to express that one should always “look at the bright side”. Hebb has said about “Sunny”:

All my intentions were to think of happier times and pay tribute to my brother – basically looking for a brighter day – because times were at a low. After I wrote it, I thought “Sunny” just might be a different approach to what Johnny Bragg was talking about in “Just Walkin’ in the Rain”.

Download “sunny” chart

Its sixteen-bar form starts with two repeats of a four-bar phrase starting on the song’s E minor tonic i chord followed by a iii7–VI and a ii–V7 in the last bar to return to the first i chord:

𝄆 Em7 𝄀 G7 𝄀 Cmaj7 𝄀 F♯m7 B7 𝄇

The third four-bar phrase’s last bar is substituted with F7 (the tritone sub of the B7 dominant chord):

𝄀 Em7 𝄀 G7 𝄀 Cmaj7 𝄀 F7 𝄀

The fourth and final four-bar phrase is a ii–V7–i that settles on the song’s tonic:

𝄀 F♯m7 𝄀 B7 𝄀 Em 𝄀 Em

“Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul’s moods.” – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Here’s an example of playing over the original recording